The not-so-Dark Ages: Stunning treasures from farmer’s field will shed light on Anglo-Saxon Britain

Stunning treasures from farmer’s field will shed light on Anglo-Saxon Britain

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published
5:30 am CDT, Saturday, October 3, 2009

Break out the superlatives: An unemployed Englishman, living on disability benefits, has unearthed the greatest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found. It has left archaeologists and historians, not usually considered excitable types, utterly gobsmacked.

And, to the delight of amateur treasure seekers everywhere, 55-year-old Terry Herbert, of Staffordshire, in the British Midlands, did it with just a hand-held metal detector, after 18 years of gleaning nothing more exciting from the local dirt than a fragment of an ancient Roman harness.

Since the booty was officially proclaimed treasure last week, Herbert is entitled to half its value, to be shared with the farmer who owns the field where it was found. Although no price can yet be set, Brian Pitts, editor of British Archaeology magazine, told The Guardian (London), “This hoard will change lives.”

He said the two men would be well compensated, because the scale of the treasure is such that evaluators have to consider the effects of “unleashing on the market a record quantity of supreme gold artistry.”

Currently, as professional excavation continues, about 1,500 objects have been unearthed, dating from between 625 and 725, according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, including 56 clumps of earth which X-rays have shown to contain pieces of metal. In all, the trove consists of about 11 pounds of gold and 5.5 pounds of silver.

The objects are indeed exquisite: Guardian reporter Maev Kennedy wrote, “There are things in the hoard of such beauty that one archaeologist found her eyes filled with tears …. garnets the size of a baby's fingernail, each backed with a sliver of crumpled gold foil so that the light bounced back from the gems.”

Most of the artifacts are martial: dagger hilts, sword pommels and helmet cheek-plates, along with animal figures and crosses. The absence of feminine jewelry and of any burial mounds or buildings nearby leads experts to surmise that they are spoils of war, battlefield trophies.

That would make sense, since Staffordshire lies in the heart of ancient Mercia, one of the most warlike of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of 7th- and 8th-century Britain.

That's another aspect of this discovery that is making archaeologists swoon: It will be of inestimable value in shedding more light on what used to be called the Dark Ages, the period between the demise of the Roman Empire in the late 5th century and about the year 1000.

The name Dark Ages derived not only from the crumbling of civilization and the ravages of barbaric, plundering hordes, but also from the paucity of documented history of the period. As Anglo-Saxon specialist Leslie Webster told The Guardian, this find will shed light on “…rising (and failing) kingdoms, the transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork.”